RaisedByPikas

There is no need for tails long enough to confuse the rap side and tail side of an EDK. It shortens how far you can rappel and adds another thing you can fuck up. I've heard a friend setting up to rappel on the wrong side because they left 5' tails but catching it before weighting the system. 18" is fine and leaves enough tail for the knot to roll a couple times. If you look at the data all of the properly tensioned and dressed EDK's didn't roll until about 1000lbs or more even when wet. That's 1000lbs on the knot side which means at least 2000lbs on the entire system.

I think the way we took to get to the upper col was much easier than what is on the summitpost map but I haven't tried the summitpost approach. Basically we stayed on the hiking trail until the ground became about 50/50 rock and heather. By this point we thought we were too high and were almost at the same elevation as the upper col. We trended up and around the ridge to the right and it was a short hike down (maybe 50 vertical ft) some easy slabby boulders to the col. Don't be tempted to climb into the gully to climbers right of the hiking trail, you should be above it.

The main problem was the Mazamas putting up fixed lines for a large group to prussic and clogging the route big time. This lead to a breakdown of the normal wait your turn or communicate with the other team about passing procedure as a few groups (including my group that took an alternate to pitch one climbers right) tried to climb variations to get around them.

When I was climbing there last fall there was a dog laying by the trail unleashed. I put my hand down for it to sniff and the damn thing snapped and came at me. I had to take a few steps back and luckily the dog relented before I had to take action. Handler acted completely surprised and embarrassed, like it had never happened before. BS. I think the dogs name was Abbey, medium sized, and it was with two female climbers. Any dog that has ever shown unprovoked aggression towards humans does not belong in public. I have no problem with unleashed well behaved animals.

I haven't been up to the summit in august but you might find yourself trying to set up camp in something that looks like this if you cant find a site that someone else cleared. The one person I know that spent a night on the summit would never do it again and said they had to spend hours chopping down the penitentes.

An easy way to clip into fixed lines is to clip them with the biner attached to one of your prusics instead of carrying a dedicated sling to clip onto fixed lines. Less junk around your junk and its no slower. This technique would work really will with a tibloc or something like that. The fixed lines on the DC last year weren't on very steep sections but a fall could have taken you over something really steep. We didn't use prussics on them, just clipped them on the way down to prevent a really bad fall, messing with prussics can still be slow even if you are pretty good at them.

Its a long way around from mazama to marblemount going via stevens pass. Google normally has it at 1.5 hours via 20 but its 5.5 hours if WA pass is closed.

This is what is known as a divide by zero error. If there is no air resistance then you would keep accelerating to infinite velocity. But at high altitudes you would have to fall further to get up enough speed to achieve the ideal glide ratio so a high altitude base jumper should need more vertical distance before they can start tracking away from the mountain.

Bolt hangars don't take a "shock" load in the sense that most climbers define because the rope is what controls the force. Obviously if you take a fall directly onto your personal anchor, climb with a static rope, or something like that then it might be different. A true shock load in the engineering sense where failures happen without deformity do the the interaction of the shock or pressure waves within the piece probably doesn't happen much in climbing even with a fall on static gear.

What kind of climbing will you be doing? "warm winter boots" might be overkill for a majority of the type of climbing around here, especially for someone starting out.

Cruising Above Paradise

backpackinglight.com has a lot of down quilt fans but they seem to be mostly good weather, low elevation gram counters. For me I cant see how they are worth the few ounces of weight savings, everytime i roll over i would get a big draft. I roll over a lot when camping on snow...

Had a good experience with AAI in Bellingham.

There are also good crevasses to lower into and climb out closer to the downstream side of that large flat ice sheet below the seracs.

They must have had some calm winds for those shots up high. Those shots were awesome.